Friday, November 19, 2004

Google Kirkland open house

The Google Kirkland open house party was last night. It was a great time. Quite a turnout, totally packed. Strong UW presence, which wasn't surprising, but I was amazed by the number of Amazon and MSN people there.

Brady Forrest (PM at MSN Search, frequent poster on MSN Search blog) was there. Scott Pitasky (former Amazon.com, now head of HR at MSN). Erik Selberg (author of Metacrawler, one of the first metasearch engines, now at MSN Search). Robert Scoble was apparently there, but I didn't bump into him.

I got a chance to catch up with a few Googlers, Joshua Redstone (old friend from graduate school, works on GFS), Peter Norvig, Jeff Dean. Jeff Dean and I had an interesting discussion about the potential for abuse of MapReduce; I was arguing you might see tragedy of the commons issues because the system makes it so easy to consume vast resources on the Google cluster, but Jeff said everyone plays nice and that it isn't an issue. I was hoping to see Joe Beda, but he couldn't make it, unfortunately. David Krane was there, but I didn't see him.

Bumped into a couple of the Slashcode guys too, Brian Aker and Chris Nandor. Unbelievable that Slashdot uses NFS in a production system, but Brian and Chris insist it's not a serious problem.

I finally got a chance to meet Todd Bishop from the Seattle PI in person. Great to see you there, Todd.